As promised, here is the “sonic mood board” that inspired my album Quiet Storm (which you can download here). Where the last “Inspirations” album was comprised of songs that inspired particular facets of songs on Quiet Storm, this one is more indicative of what music I was listening to when I was inspired to create the concept of the album: nocturnal, sexy, emotional, romantic, soft and tough, vulnerable and strong in one go. As you will see from the tracklist before, it’s an R&B compilation through and through; I’d go as far as to say that these are some of the best contemporary R&B songs over the last 15 years (interestingly, quite a few of them are early Missy Elliott / Timbaland productions… I miss those days!). Of course, the list is not exhaustive and I had to cut down from over 50 songs to the 19 that you see here; anyway, I hope that you will enjoy downloading the album, listening to the songs and perhaps discover some artists or some songs that you didn’t know, or hadn’t heard in ages. Download link is at the bottom underneath the tracklisting. Enjoy!!!

So it’s been 9 months since I released Quiet Storm, my most recent album, and I recently had the idea of compiling the songs that inspired the record so that you could hear some of the wonderful tracks that inspire me. Some you will know, some I hope will be new to you and can open up your ears to new songs and sounds 🙂

Putting together all the songs last night, I realised I have far too many to keep to one album’s worth, so treat this as Volume 1: these are the songs that directly influenced songs, production or lyrics on the album. Volume 2 will be more abstract, a mood piece which had songs that were instrumental when I was first creating the concept of the album. As I’m starting to get ready to think about my next record, something that I like to do is think about what I want to say, and what songs epitomise the sound and concept I am going for: a sonic mood board, if you will. Volume 2 will try to recreate the sonic mood board I had for Quiet Storm.

My album is here! I sincerely hope you like it – I’ve already been showing you some of the artwork in the past week, and you get all the m4a files + an album booklet with all the lyrics and a few photos in it. I do you right! 🙂 I’ll be uploading more links during the next day or so, but for the moment you can download it HERE! Songs for preview are available on my myspace if you wanna have a listen to some of the songs. 😉 Enjoy!!! I’ll run through the various songs in a post soon so you’ll learn a bit more about them, but some of them are very fun, while others are quite personal to me. Thanks for the support, and I really hope you like the music and feel it. Here’s the tracklisting once more:

Just a quick track-by-track run-through of all the songs on my High Fashion mixtape! I hope you enjoy it and this fleshes out the stories behind the music for you all 🙂

High Fashion

The photos for this mixtape were actually the last thing to get done! I had a lot of ideas for it, but basically it involved playing dressup and taking lots of fun fun pictures of me pouting in designer accessories and too much lip balm and radiating attitude! Trust me, some of the pictures were horrendous, but I was pleased that I got some decent ones that I chose to use. In contrast to the Quiet Storm artwork, which incorporates a lot of dark blues, purples and blacks with white type and layered translucent textures (evocative of the intimate, nocturnal atmosphere embodied by the album), the artwork for the mixtape is very bright, very immediate (no gloss or photoshopping!) and very tongue in cheek – I do not dress that ostentatiously in real life!!! But it was a lot of fun 🙂

Official Boy

This song was recorded a year ago – obviously, it’s a cover of Cassie’s song “Official Girl”… I seem to be the only one who loved that song! I was obsessed with that song at the time because I could relate – I was semi-dating somebody but didn’t know where I stood. (It turned out to be nowhere.) So I got the instrumental and decided to rerecord my version – in the process, I learned a lot about creating vocal layers and harmonies and counter-melodies, and I appreciated how densely the original song is constructed. I also wrote my own rap, which was really fun. I really liked Cassie’s latest material, as I did a cover of this song and “Touch Me” samples another Cassie song, “Nobody But You”.

This song uses the instrumental of Day26’s “Imma Put It On Her”, continuing the love for Bad Boy artists. I have always been impressed by Diddy’s production skills and most of the Bad Boy tracks that have come out over the last 12 years have had really solid music and production. It’s a remix of the song “Hook Boy” on Quiet Storm, and so I changed up the melody and some of the lyrics somewhat, but the basic skeleton of the song remains the same, though this remix has a more celebratory, uptempo feel to it, relishing being in the club and being with the one you love.

Get Me Home (Interlude)

I liked the harmonies on this one, but I have an interlude called “Focused” on the album where I did a superior job of a similar type of harmony, so I removed this track from the album and kept it for the mixtape.

Jump Off (Part I) (Snippet)

The original version of a song which is on the album (appropriately called “Jump Off (Part II)”), this is a very straight-up R&B ballad, no frills. The lyrics have been kept more or less identical between the two songs, but Part II has a much more R&B, nocturnal feel which I fell in love with and which suited the feel of the album as a whole much more. I might finish this version eventually, because I think it has potential, but I kinda left it by the wayside in favour of Part II, which is one of my favourite tracks on Quiet Storm, and very lyrically honest.

Don’t Look Now (Game Over)

This song was written after I was seeing somebody who just suddenly disappeared with the excuse that “I need space”… BULLSHIT mayne!!! I decided to channel my irritation positively, and this record was a cutting, dance-type response to that whole situation. I like the lyrics in it, which pay a nod to “Bad Girl” and “Pretty Boy” by the now sadly defunct Danity Kane, as well as Beyoncé’s “Irreplaceable”. My favourite lyric is “dangerous and brokenhearted”, and I briefly considered that as an album title. I love the ring of it, but ultimately there is something about the song that meant it couldn’t hang with the rest of the tracks that made the album, so ultimately it got relegated to the mixtape!

Pronunciation (Interlude)

This was just a big big laugh… it sets the scene for the next song, “Armani Earrings”, which is a track on Quiet Storm that I just had so much fun writing, as it really epitomises swagger! The idea came from the “learn Italian” tapes they play in the bathrooms at Frankie & Benny’s restaurants, and working in The Perfume Shop and getting irritated at how many designers names got mangled by customers on a regular basis. So this interlude is a play on all of those things, as well as a lead-in to the next track.

Armani Earrings

… you’re gonna have to wait for the story behind this one!!! Just enjoy it for now 🙂

Can’t Play A Playa

Originally I was so excited about this track, with the military gunshot-style intro and the catchy hook… but somewhere along the line, although I tried out a lot of different ideas such as having a rap in the middle of the song instead of at the bridge, and multiple hooks and stuff, I felt it lost the sparkle and drive I was aiming for the song to have, so I didn’t feel it was strong enough to make the album. I like the song, but I just couldn’t execute it the way I wanted to so I kept it back for the mixtape.

Wild Heart

During my time at Oxford uni, I became friends online with a guy who got into trying to write and produce his own songs. He sent me this track that he’d written and produced (the production is a slightly different style to anything I’ve done, though the song itself I like), and asked me to resing it. I went a bit crazy with it, attacking it with different melodies and ad-libs, and when I sent it back he was like “WOW you have CHANGED it!!!” I really liked the way it turned out, but I think he was somewhat taken aback… I never really considered this song for the album, especially as my only input into it was changing some of the melodies, harmonies and structuring, but I like it nonetheless so I thought that there was no harm in putting it on High Fashion.

Role Model

The first element of this song that I had was the bassline, and then I just started adding lyrics to it. I remember half of it was written in my head on a car journey with my parents, and the minute we got back in the door I rushed upstairs and spent an hour creating the song. I like the sung chorus element, because it really expressed how I don’t feel that I fit easily into many categories that people try to pigeon-hole me into. In terms of the music I listen to, my educational background and my sexuality (among other things), I don’t really feel that what is widely portrayed in the cinema really represents me, and I wanted to put across the fact that just because there is a stereotype for these things doesn’t mean that everybody necessarily fits them. Although it’s not my finest hour rapping (and I like to think that the rhymes on “Armani Earrings” demonstrate how much I’ve improved), the lyrical subject matter is very true and I am positive I am not the only young person who feels misrepresented. You have to be who you are, for the sake of who you are.

Broke WIthout Remedy

I was listening to Erykah Badu’s most recent album New Amerykah and wanted to do a song which was a bit more unstructured and organic sounding, so I hit up Garageband and started playing with samples. This is the result! I was near the end of my university degree at Oxford, and I was kinda frustrated because I didn’t know where I was going next and I was in a lot of debt and I was just like “what happened? I thought this degree would solve all my problems and it’s just left me with more!” With my new uni course and being so happy and that being beyond me, the perspective I now have of Oxford is perhaps more balanced and I can appreciate the quality of degree and the good friends that I got from there, but at the time of writing / singing the song, I was feeling quite down. Towards the end, my voice cracks and I kept it in as evidence of too much cigarettes + emotional despair = raw vocals!

Another little acapella taster of the “High Fashion” track on my album. The Intro uses some of the backing music, and the outro uses the first verse and chorus of the song. Although I’m not 100% happy about ending the album with 2 acapellas in a row, I definitely thought that these last two songs both deserved to be on the mixtape and both fit at the end.

So there you are! Once again, you can download the mixtape HERE and I really hope you enjoy it! 🙂

FINALLY!!! My High Fashion mixtape is here! I won’t go into too much detail here, as tomorrow I’ll post up a little track-by-track rundown so you have a little story behind each of the tracks, and why they’re collected on here as opposed to on the Quiet Storm album proper. This mixtape is a collection of cover versions, outtakes, b-sides and remixes of songs on the album… plus it includes 3 tracks which are on Quiet Storm (including first single “Touch Me“) to whet your appetite for the album coming at the end of October (keep an eye out!).

I sincerely hope you enjoy the mixtape, and remember – these are the tracks that didn’t make Quiet Storm, so I honestly think that the best is yet to come! This mixtape is just a fun little tidbit to whet your appetites. Let me know if you need me to re-up the download link or any other comments that you have, and keep it locked! 🙂